Ocean Observing and Climate

ASMOS: Assessment of the Surface Marine Observing System

ASMOS was a project funded by the UK Met Office through the National Centre for Ocean Forecasting (NCOF). The goal of ASMOS was to develop a set of metrics that the Met Office can use to assess the adequacy of the surface marine observing system for climate applications.

Climate researchers today rely more and more on data that have been collected operationally for a variety of applications including for weather forecasting. Although the adequacy of the observations for the immediate purpose is already assessed routinely, the adequacy for applications down-stream, such as the development of climate datasets, is not currently assessed as part of the operational system.

The data requirements for surface meteorological variables (e.g. air temperature, sea surface temperature, pressure, humidity, wind speed and direction) will be assessed. The number of observations needed will vary with the stringency of the user requirement, the accuracy of the observations, the variability of the particular parameter in space and time, with the correlation length and timescales and with the availability of supporting metadata. Using all this information ASMOS will deliver relatively simple metrics which can be used to determine whether or not the surface marine observing systems can be used to produce climate datasets that will meet user requirements. Information from ASMOS will help planning for the Global Climate Observing System.